In the following, my aim is to examine the Carterian performativity
in its relation to textuality, corporeality and femininity in my
favorite of Carter's original works, the 1984 Nights at the Circus,
(4) a novel called by Tamas Benyei a narrative of seduction, magic, play
and primarily spectacularity. (5) I wish to reveal parallel spectacular,
seductive and tricky performances of bodies and texts by providing a
complex analysis of the semioticized body in the text and of the
subversively somatized text on the body. (6) My reading of spectacular
corporeal and textual performances focuses on the winged giantess
aerialiste heroine, revealing how the grotesque Fevvers' parading
deconstructive performances of ideologically prescribed femininity, of
the normatively beautiful feminine body and its limiting representations
coincide with the Carterian narrative's spectacular revisions of
literary genres and writing styles, which are identified by discursive
technologies of power with femininity, and are thus conventionally
canonized as less valuable, that is, sentimentally kitsch or
incomprehensibly hysterical modes of writing by silly lady novelists or
raving mad women for a "lesser," laic female audience. My
gender-sensitive, reader-response theoretical approach
highlights--besides Fevvers' spectacular, subversive body--the
bifocal pleasures, tender irony and sisterly burlesque of the
subversively, (self-)ironic silly and histrionic hysteric "feminine" textual performance, in order to reveal that the
conventional concepts of a domineering patriarchal language violently
incorporating and domineering weaker ecriture feminine are
demythologized, as the journalist becoming clown-poet readily enters the
carnivalesque grotesque narrative, laughing together with the confidence
trickster winged aerialiste author. My final aim is to examine how
Fevvers' confidence trick reveals that besides ideologically
prescribed silence, (7) superficiality, stereotypes and
incomprehensibility, there are other wor(l)ds available for daring women
writers and readers alike.

Parodie bodily performances, spectacular gender trouble

The picaresque Nights at the Circus narrates the magical adventures
of Fevvers, the winged giantess, a born (or rather hatched) performer,
trickster, trapeze artist, starring in the 1899 Grand Imperial Tour of
Colonel Kearney's circus. Fevvers, the monstrous aerialiste with
wings, incorporates all conventional tropes of mythical femininity,
fusing freak and angel into one. Antagonistically, she acts out the
"feathered frump" "cripple" (19), the
"marvellous monster," the estranged "alien creature"
(161), a giantess bound to Earth, with useless wings, her mutant bodily
protuberances recalling the deformations of a hunchback, while
simultaneously she also performs the role of the sexually threatening
yet sublime aerialiste, the angelic winged wonder, a "fabulous
bird-woman" (15) defying the laws of gravity in her graceful and
erotic art on the trapeze. Fevvers becomes the "New Woman,"
who subverts the conventional, limiting concepts of femininity by
enacting them all, without reserve, to the extreme, and thus embodying
the carnivalesque grotesque defined by Mihail Bakhtin as transgressive
corporeality's potential of subverting systems, violating
boundaries, and resisting closure by its ambiguous, open, changing,
unfinished, irregular, heterogeneous, protruding, corporeal, and
excessive performance (8) that may also provide enough space for
feminist authorial agency, female revision and winged women's
words. Fevvers, an irregular, heterogeneous, changing grotesque being is
the "Queen of ambiguities, goddess of in-between states" (81),
her slogan "Is she fact or is she fiction?" underlines the
polysemic nature of her performative, spectacular identity. Fevvers
mocks the spectators' (the readers') epistemophiliac,
fetishistic gazes, she never provides a final answer to her being a fact
or a fiction. Walser can merely ponder the paradox: "an authentic
miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world
(?)" (17), while Fevvers laughs at him (at us), adding ironically
"Oh, Lizzie, the gentleman must know the truth!" (35).
Fantastic and freak, Fevvers embodies the Kristevian subject in
process/on trial (9) balancing on a borderline in a grotesque body
always becoming another, performing a carnivalesque subversion of the
hierarchical social order, of the homogeneous subject, of transparent
language and of conventional representations of femininity. She is
simultaneously "Cockney sparrow" (41) and "tropical
bird," cripple and celestial, vulgar and sublime, bird and woman,
virgin and whore, giantess and aerialiste, the "anomaly" of
universally feminine "symbolic Woman" (161) and singular,
heterogeneous "a-woman" (10) in her subjective corporeal
reality, thus--playing on the subversive grotesque pregnant body--she
can give birth to herself again and again anew.

Fevvers' spectacular performances in Ma Nelson's brothel
and Madame Schreck's Museum of Woman Monsters, her posing in
tableau vivant as Cupid, "the sign of love," as Winged
Victory, "a perfect, active beauty ... mutilated by history"
(37), and as the castrating femme fatale Angel of Death, also carry
ambivalent meanings. She repeats patriarchal stereotypical
representations of women with a wink, via a "perverse dynamics of
transgressive reinscription," (11) a parody turned into politics,
she performs a la Judith Butler a "gender trouble" with the
aim to denaturalize the regulative fiction of a true gender identity,
and to reveal the culturally constituted, ideologically-discursively
reproduced, repetitive and overall performative aspect of gender, that
is always already a "copy of the copy," (12) and thus to
provide in the long run an ironic critique of the ideology of
representation limiting female identification. According to Butler and
Fevvers, it is only within the (patriarchal) practices of repetitive
signifying that alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, new
possibilities of gender contesting the rigid codes of hierarchical
binarisms and subversions of substantive identity may become possible.
(13) Butler's description of "doing gender trouble" is
particularly fitting for Fevvers' carnivalesque grotesque
performance: "doing gender [she] repeat[s] and displace[s] through
hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation the very
constructs by which [her possibilities of doing gender] are
mobilized." (14) Fevvers' wings recall patriarchal topoi as
the Victorian Angel in the House, defined uniquely in relation to man as
subordinated wife and mother, the Muse exploited to inspire male
creativity and muted herself, Fairies objected to the rape of the male
gaze, as well as the winged statue of Nike of Samothrace, which simply
lacks a head. However, realizing her performative possibilities for
proliferating alternative gender configurations, she subverts these
cliches of femininity from within: she acts out an angel in the house of
suffragette whores, her sexual activity mocks the Victorian angel, yet
she also challenges the stereotype of the whore, the supernatural
succubus, as her confidence trick is based on her claimed virginity. She
continuously uses her heterogeneous body as a space for the narrative
deconstruction of her identity, by technologies of the self working
against Foucaultian technologies of power, she erases and rewrites
traditional stories of femininity, weaving her own texts, becoming an
author of her own. Fevvers is a self-parodic and self-made woman
(de)constructing her patchwork wings by recycling the divine Leda and
the Swan just as much as a lowly London pigeon. She flies by reweaving
myths and gossip, art and craft, by relying subversively on the
established knowledge of library books just as much as on Lizzie's
innovative calculations, and on Baudelaire's albatross-artist. She
is never what she seems to be, she performs simulacra, her repetition is
a revision of icons of femininity and an embodiment of her multiple
selves, constituting a part of her confidence trick, a subversive
feminist tactic, revealing a liberating play of carnivalesque identities
and narratives inspired by a heterogeneous body, rendering engendered,
homogeneous identity "radically incredible." (15)

Paulina Palmer (16) celebrates in Nights at the Circus
Fevvers' feminist performance of identity, passing from coded
mannequin to bird woman, and turning from the investigation of
femininity as entrapping, regulatory fiction towards a subversive play
with femininity, its mimesis and role reversals. Linda Hutcheon and Mary
Russo (17) highlight Fevvers' parodic feminization revealing a
decentered politics of representation, and Russo goes further by
claiming that the winged heroine "revamping spectacle" unveils
how the cultural production conceals work, sweat and materiality via
stylized spectacle, and how Fevvers enacts the grotesquely deformed
female body as cultural construct in order to reclaim it and to rechart
aeriality as a corporeal space of revisionary repetitions and new
possibilities.

Fevvers' parodic enactments of femininity incite the
subversive laughter of Butlerian gender trouble as they highlight that
the original, authentic and real (gender, identity, language, hierarchy,
etc.) are merely constituted themselves as effects in the social theatre
of illusions. Her parodic performance embodies a feminist political
tactic described by Carter in her "Notes from the Front Line,"
as a "questioning of the nature of [my] reality as a woman. How
that social fiction of [my] 'femininity' was created, by means
outside [my] control, and palmed off on [me] as the real thing."
(18) Fevvers performs her "authentic womanliness" as a
socially constructed, represented, non-essential identity, recalling
Butler's drag, Sontag's camp, Irigaray's mimicry and
Riviere's masquerade (19) (her irony substituting the anxiety of
the latter). Her dress always appears theatricalized as cross-dressing,
she displays all the compulsory markers of femininity excessively,
almost in a hamming, buffoonish manner: "she batted her eyelids
like a flirt. She lowered her voice to a whisper ... her breath
flavoured with champagne, warmed his cheek 'I dye sir!'
'What?' 'My feathers, sir! I dye them!'" (25).
Thus, with a difference, she seems to act out a "femininity"
that is always already under a deconstructive line of erasure or in
quotation marks. The carnivalesque excess of her self-ironic, playful
performance of "becoming woman" shatters the "iron maiden
of beauty myth" (20) and the illusory feminine body framed in it by
the normative ideological technology of gender and body discipline
working through representations perpetuating patriarchal (beauty) myths
about women through a painfully paradoxical iconography of femininity to
be carved onto the female flesh. Fevvers' greasepaint in her
dressing room does not reconstitute but rather deconstructs the
conventionally beautiful femininity, as it demythologizes patriarchal
images of the abject female or the ethereal feminine, and in
"becoming women" puts emphasis on becoming, heterogeneity and
revision.

Fevvers, a subversive seductress, defies the male gaze by taking
advantage of her feminine "being-looked-at-ness"; (21) to her
slogan "look at me!" she adds "Look! (but) Hands
off!" (15) to provide a self-conscious metatext on her spectacular
femininity in the voice of the ambiguous intacta-whore, who is an
exhibitionist-voyeur as she finds pleasure in her female gaze as well.
The giantess aerialiste's eyes, the most grotesque body parts in
the Bakhtinian corporeal topography, gain an erotic investment and a
feminist re-visionary potential:

She turned her immense eyes upon him, those eyes made for the stage
... Walser felt the strangest sensation as if these eyes of the
aerialiste were a pair of sets of Chinese boxes, as if each one
opened into a world into a world into a world, an infinite
plurality of worlds, and these unguessable depths exercised the
strongest possible attraction, so that he felt himself trembling as
if he, too, stood on an unknown threshold.
(29, see 40, 48, 78, 87)

As Mary Russo claims, the grotesque body of the trapeze artist
destabilizes gender by an ambiguous relation to the gaze: on the one
hand her being objected to the scopophilia of the male spectator
reinforces masculine power position, but on the other hand the voyeur is
obliged to look upward, and is hence diminished, becoming "dwarfed,
clownish or infantilized" (22) due precisely to the gaze destined
to master the woman as spectacle. Fevvers subverts her spectacularity to
her own ends, ambiguous, ever-changing she can never be pinned down as a
trophy of the male Collector, she resists the final meanings desired by
journalist Walser aiming to decode her as a great humbug of the world.
Fevvers looks back laughing and contemplates her being a spectacle with
a wink.

The tender irony and sisterly burlesque of textual performance

Whereas Fevvers' femininity is clearly portrayed as a
confidence trick, a spectacular parodic performance, a mise-en-abyme of
stereotypical feminine beauty and gender roles with meta-reflexive,
critical self-consciousness, it is less explicit that the traditionally
feminine modes of writing; styles and genres (f)used in the narrative
are also of a tenderly ironic, performative, spectacular, meta-reflexive
nature. Several critics interpret Nights at the Circus as a postmodern
sentimental love story. Pitying its limiting stereotypical feminine
literary representation or praising its utopian feminist, recycled
feminine potential, they think that the novel remains within the frames
of the feminine romance tradition. Carolyn See describes the novel as an
old-fashioned romance, (23) while in Sarah Gamble's view the novel
with an idyllic happy ending is "absolutely serious in maintaining
the desirability and the perils of romantic love," and in stressing
the need for "authentic emotion to be had in the world outside the
circus," whereas according to Andrzej Gasiorek, the novel
"envisages the closing of the last century as the opening of a
brave new feminist world," (24) and Magali Cornier Michael claims
that its rewritten femininity seriously combines didactic material
realist feminism with utopian feminism. (25) Although the former two
interpretations seem rather simplistic and the latter may look like
over-politicized programme readings, unlike Beth A. Boehm, I would not
call them misreadings--in Boehm's exact words "failures to
employ the interpretive strategies the author has imagined to be
available to the reader." (26) After the Barthesian death of the
author, in a pantextual deconstructive era of self-disseminating
meanings and inevitable misreadings, in my view, the concept of
"misreading" as a standard of value has lost its validity,
and--regarding any process of significance that, instead of closing,
opens up the free play of multiple meanings of a text--it is better to
avoid the patriarchal binary hierarchization between good and bad, laic
and elite, feminine and feminist readings. Recalling my first reading of
Nights at the Circus, in the late 1990s, in my early twenties, I
remember having found pleasure in reading the novel--which I found
somehow similar to my former favorite, Carter's short-story,
"The Company of Wolves"--as the celebration of a blissful
reunion of violent binary gender oppositions, a common initiation into
the paradisiac realm of shared sexual pleasures, in the spirit of
Eastern philosophy of the Foucauldian ars erotica. I do not think that
the enthusiasm of my past, romantic reception of the novel is a less
valuable readerly experience, even less an interpretative failure, as
compared to my present, perhaps less naive, and critically more
self-conscious, feminist re-reading. Elaborating on Susan Rubin
Suleiman's concept of bifocal vision, I would like to call these
two different readerly gazes, looking alike for textual pleasure with a
shared scopophiliac curiosity, bifocal and myopic readerly point of
view. Suleiman--fusing Gertrude Stein's bipolar
beauty-constitutions, and compressing Roland Barthes's readerly
pleasure of studium and jouissance of punctum into one gaze--defines
bifocal vision as a view combining a restful, classicizing contemplation
of a reassuring aesthetic ideal and a restless, contemporary struggle
with and against an inventive, irritating, witty alternative
anti-aesthetic. (27) Speaking of contemporary women's
writing's body-texts, I think that bifocal vision implies a
parallel perception of the restful feminine literary tradition and of
(its) restless, ironic, feminist metatext, that is, a simultaneous
reading of the ideologically prescribed, engendering, disciplining text
of "femininity" written on the body and of the self-conscious
feminist, daring, other voices, the poetic, political, playful
subversive (re)writings from the heterogeneous body. Whereas the myopic
reader's sedentary satisfaction means to under-stand calmly the
literary work within its own episteme, its own prison house of fixed
representation, the bifocal vision is an open double-take performed by a
reader willing to come face to face with her own unmasked self mirrored
in the window through which she watches the textual landscape passing by
in a figurative literary journey, it is a revision by a nomadic reader
willing to err, to deviate, to wander, to run risks, and to fly with the
text. The theoretical premises of bifocality coincide with the Carterian
narrative, which is always an excessive, spectacular, risky performance;
as Carter puts it in a literary theoretical comment: "We travel
along the thread of the narrative like high-wire artists. That is our
life." (28) Thus both author and reader may be identified with the
high-wire artist; accordingly, to me it seems feasible to identify the
implied author of Nights at the Circus with the winged aerialiste,
Fevvers; however, I do not think that the ideal reader, or, in
Boehm's words, the "authorial audience," must necessarily
be a risk-taking rope-dancer. The bird-woman trapeze artist's
performance may provide unique amusement from the direct bodily
closeness of the myopic perspective, as seen from the theatre-box's
first row by the ravished, naive, laic spectator, spellbound by the
identification, and it may just as much enchant from the bird's-eye
view distance of the critically self-conscious, professional gaze,
constituting the elite view of the expert voyeur, connoisseur of
acrobatic arts, specific weight of female bodies and the nature of
gravity; but it also carries charms of its own, when viewed from an
in-between space of "now you see it, now you don't,"
allowing for the bifocal pleasures of self-reflection along with
identification. One should note that before becoming a reader performing
a bifocal (re)vision one is always already a myopic reader, one must
pass through the stage of ideologically prescribed feminine reading in
order to provide a subversive feminist reading (which will inherently
incorporate the feminine reading). The ambiguous, revisionary
feminist-feminine bifocal perspective reflects the paradox of parodic
metafiction that has to invoke the very ideology it aims to subvert.

The Carterian "demythologizing business" reweaves
fossilized (patriarchal) myths into innovative (feminist) texts, refills
old bottles with new wine "especially if the pressure of the new
wine makes the old bottles explode," (29) dissects conventionally
limiting representations of femininity to revive a new woman, a neither
monster nor angel (or ironically both?!), female Frankenstein, a
self-made winged freak writing a text of her own, reconstructed from
bits and pieces of the lesser genres, despised styles, silly themes of a
marginalized feminine literary tradition. By feminine literary tradition
I mean here any piece of (but especially initial attempts at)
women's writing that is in a phallogocentric logic biologically
determined, by patriarchal literary institutions canonized and through
ideologically governed interpretive strategies conventionally decoded as
sentimental, kitsch, expressively confessional, incomprehensible
hysterical, odd modes of popular writing, speaking up in the compulsory
prescribed feminine voice of the submissive angel or the screaming
madwoman. Carter is a woman writer situated in a tradition of nineteenth
century fellow female writers labeled as silly and sentimental and of
modernist women artists with voices coined irrational and hysteric, she
has to speak from a position located in a patriarchal society (some
reproach her staying within a heterosexual scenario in which her
heroines remain women, self-consciously but still feminine), thus one
lens of her bifocal view always focuses on already ideologically
femininized literature, while the other looks for possibilities of
re-vision. My aim is to disentangle the subversive meta-text weaved upon
debilitating narratives of the phallogocentric master-text of
patriarchal canon and its feminimized mistress-text by submissively
silly lady novelists or incomprehensible, mad women writers, constructed
by canonization's engendering ideological technology. I will trace
the irony of a text performing--like Fevvers' spectacular
body--cliches of femininity, in order to reveal the confidence trick, to
read the difference in the deconstructive feminist, mocking repetition
of the feminine voice.

While Linda Hutcheon quotes Nights at the Circus as a par
excellence example of postmodern parody, Lorna Sage highlights the
pastiche nature of Carter's text "littered with quotations and
allusions," and Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton stress
"the carnivalesque fun, the mordant wit, the biting irony that turn
Shakespeare into a burlesque and bring Sade into the feminist bedroom
[being] very much part of a serious intellectual stand that Carter took
on Western culture," (30) I prefer to refer to Carter's
subversive repetition of the feminine literary tradition as a tender
irony, a knowing, metatextual, sisterly burlesque laughter shared with
women writers of the mimed feminine literary tradition in a comic text
that is also a dialogic, intertextual hommage to the pioneers of
women's literature bound by patriarchal limits. As Sarolta
Marinovich-Resch notes, parody in women's writing is not
necessarily a crude joke, a disgracing, trivializing, ridiculizing
caricature at the expense of the imitated text, but rather, contrarily,
it challenges women's literary norms to renew and renovate, not to
discredit them. Thus, it may ensure, from its shifting, dialogic,
satiric perspective, a swipe at literary and social patriarchy by a
parodic defence of reading and writing by women. (31)

Although Butler, Hutcheon and Marinovich-Resch use the term
"parody" with reference to subversive, metafictional rewriting
(of narratives of femininity), as for me, instead of parody--which I
feel somewhat closer to the scornful and contemptible, maliciously
diminishing and derogatory, sometimes narcissistic "tendentious wit" of caricature, satire and sarcasm--I find the concept of
"irony"--that is, a deliberate dissembling or hiding of the
actual case not to deceive but to achieve special, usually humorous
rhetorical or artistic effects (32)--more adequate to characterize the
Carterian textual performance for several reasons. Firstly, irony's
mocking self-understatement matches the buffoonish masked spectacle of
self, while the ironic reversal equals the grotesque inversions
recurrent in the text. Secondly, the ironic perception implies the
bifocal perspective's interpretive pleasures, recalling, in Wayne
C. Booth's view, the optical illusion of the famous figure used by
Wittgenstein and Gombrich, on which you see either a rabbit or a duck,
as the figure clicks back and forth in the process of recognition and
reconstruction, surpassing the naive pleasure of a single view (seeing
only one figure), whereas our attention focuses on the trickiness of the
process and our awareness of duplicity provides delights of ambiguity
and results in the greatest intellectual and artistic achievement:
"learning how to say both-and, not either-or, when we see that
people and works of art are too complex for true or false tests."
(33) Thirdly, the more tender "irony conveys an implicit compliment
to the intelligence of readers" (34) invited to play with the text
and realize other meanings and metatextual levels, implying the tribute
to all women attempting at the pen. And most importantly irony's
harmless humor--although subtle, coded, and capable of remaining
hidden--achieves its fullest effect when the tender ironic intention,
the sisterly burlesque, the female grotesque fusing democratic
solidarity with carnivalesque mockery, and the laughter provoked are
shared by past and present authors and readers alike in a communal
pleasure of laughing with instead of laughing at others and oneself.
Therefore, in the case of Carterian narrative, the (self-)ironic textual
performance incites a subversive and feminist laughter that signifies
complicity, alliance, a shared wink, a common wisdom, and mutual
healing.

A silly novel by an ironic lady novelist

On its first reading, Nights at the Circus certainly recalls the
stereotypical romance plot, well known from popular feminine literature
or Hollywood movie-scenarios: a simple, rational young man meets an
enigmatic, unreachable, fantastic female star, their mutual attraction
promises a reassuring romantic reunion, yet--according to the obligatory
detour of the Brooksian plot, (35) in order to guarantee the maximal
pleasure of the text--they have to have several adventures, affront evil
adversaries aiming to separate them, and surmount innumerable obstacles
and misunderstandings, including their own blindness before the hero can
solve the waiting heroine's secret, save her for the final nth
time, and thus their love can finally be fulfilled in compulsory,
socially sanctioned marriage and they can be each other's and live
happily ever after. However, the close reader of Carter's text
surely reveals how the traditional feminine romance plot, referred to by
Gilbert and Gubar as "the Pamela plot," (36) is multiply
subverted: it is the apparently immature young man who is repeatedly
somehow saved (from the tiger, the Strongman, the clowns, and the
Shaman), healed, cared for by the seemingly much wiser heroine, who in
her grotesque corporeal reality is not in the least way an ideal,
immaculate, subordinate feminine woman, moreover her enigma cannot be
solved, and her victorious laughter at their final reunion makes the
hero wonder whether it is not he who is the butt of her joke. Nights at
the Circus rewrites the traditional feminine Kunstlerroman, as its
heroine is always already a (woman) writer gifted with creative
imagination from the beginning and speaking up in the polyphonic voice
of (two Scheherezades, Fevvers and Lizzie) the authoress who has always
been, in the fashion of Deleuze and Guattari, a legion. The feminine
Bildungsroman is also subverted by its self-proliferation in the
vertiginous multiplication of embedded life-narratives of marginalized
creatures (Fanny Four Eyes, Sleeping Beauty, Wilthshire Wonder,
Albert/Albertina, Cobwebs and Toussaint from the Museum of Woman
Monsters, Mignon, Princess of Abyssinia from the Circus, Olga from the
Panopticon) with whom the heroine feels solidarity and whose
sister-texts are embedded in her cross-genre historical, picaresque,
Bildungs novel, ironically made to be recorded by a rational journalist,
a male auktor becoming "the amanuensis of all those whose tales
we've yet to tell him, the histories of those women who would
otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they
had never been" (285), and whose authoritative pen is ironically
directed by the oral, private, half-magic, half-real autofiction of the
stereotypically silly and hysteric female writer, who nevertheless
self-consciously aims at a subversive canon de/reformation. Conventional
feminine romance's idealization, moralizing, and hierarchical
gender structure are repeated ironically only to be subverted: the
heroine is heavenly sublime yet also abject grotesque, she is angelic
yet always a woman on top, myths (femininity, motherhood, 21, 283;
marriage, 21, 39, 46, 230, 280, 281, 282; nature, 61; normality, 220;
Christianity, 176, 239; humanity, 110; law, 211) are mockingly
demythologized, norms and values are questioned in a carnivalesque
shifting tone in which kitsch sentimental exaltation (of traditional
romance values) turns into overplayed hysteric excess transformed into a
subversively (self-)ironic metatext commenting on the novel's own
silly, happy ending, demythologizing feminine romance and radical
utopian feminism alike:

'The Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon's lair is
always forced to marry her, whether they've taken a liking to one
another or not. That's the custom. And I don't doubt that custom
will apply to the trapeze artist who rescues the clown. The name of
this custom is a "happy ending."'
'Marriage,' repeated Fevvers, in a murmur of awed distaste. But
after a moment, she perked up.
'Oh, but Liz--think of his malleable look. As if a girl could mould
him any way she wanted. Surely he'll have the decency to give
himself to me, when we meet again, not to expect the vice versa!
Let him hand himself over to my safekeeping, and I will transform
him ... I'll sit on him. I'll hatch him out, I'll make a new man of
him. I'll make him into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the
New Woman, and onward we'll march hand in hand into the New
Century--'
Lizzie detected a note of rising hysteria in the girl's voice.
(281)

Fevvers' language and style certainly recall that of the
popular feminine romances' heroines whom their authors intend to
characterize--in George Eliot's ironic words--by a "general
propensity to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length," a
unique gift of "amazingly eloquent" and "amazingly
witty" conversations, the linguistic genius of a "polking
polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline," picking up foreign languages
"with the same aerial facility that the butterfly sips
nectar," the creativity of a "superior authoress, whose pen
moves in a quick decided manner when she is composing" lofty
monologues in a philosophical, moralizing yet enthusiastic,
high-spirited, wildly romantic "Ossianic fashion," fascinating
and silencing even men. (37) George Eliot, an elite, rational, severe
critic of "silly novels by lady novelists," labels their
feminine style annoyingly affected, emotive, sentimental, banal,
superficial, hypocritical, hysteric, hyperbolic and talkative, thus
reinforcing all the cliches of the stereotypical concept of feminine
discourse. (38) The patriarchally conventional idea of silly feminine
style is oftentimes associated with the engendered concept of kitsch,
that is--in Abraham A. Moles' definition--(also) dysfunctional,
rationally inadequate, superficial, excessive, capricious, sensory
totalitarian, yet popular, mediocre and comfortably comprehensible. (39)
Accordingly, at first sight of the winged aerialiste the male gaze of
Walser immediately interprets her as the par excellence embodiment of
femininity, synonymous with kitsch ("On the stage of Alhambra, when
the curtain went up, there she was, prone in a feathery heap ... behind
tinsel bars ... how kitsch," 14). However, Fevvers' reader has
to realize that for the bird-woman, her being "a bird in a gilded
cage" is, via an ironic excess staged as a spectacle with a wink,
turning silly, submissive femininity (and frightening, female freak), as
well as her languages, her ideologically available discursive
self-representations into a subversive, metareflexive, carnivalesque
grotesque performance. As the excessive overflow, the maniac
accumulation of the too dense and overplayed cliches of kitsch,
commonplaces of feminine style in Fevvers' pathetic, prophetic,
poetic utterances suggest, the stereotypically silly feminine language
is merely staged, in a spectacular performance with a finale of brief,
mockingly disillusioning remarks, implicit (self-)ironic metatextual
comments of the polyphonic woman writer, demythologizing from a bifocal
perspective, denaturalizing, deconstructing via a playfully borderline
(both silly and self-ironic), balancing aerialiste-discourse the
ideologically gendered concepts of feminine (or phallogocentric)
language:

'And once the world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can
dawn, then, ah, then! All the women will have wings, the same as I.
This young woman in my arms, whom we found tied hand and foot with
the grisly bonds of ritual, will suffer no more of it, she will
tear off her mind forg'd manacles, will rise up and fly away. The
dolls' house doors will open, the brothels will spill forth their
prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in
every land, will let forth their inmates singing together the dawn
chorus of the new, the transformed--'
'It's going to be more complicated than that,' interpolated Lizzie
...
But her daughter swept on, regardless, as if intoxicated with
vision.
'On that bright day when I am no more a singular being but, warts
and all the female paradigm, no longer an imagined fiction but a
plain fact--then he will slap down his notebooks, bear witness to
me and my prophetic role. Think of him, Lizzie, as one who carries
the evidence--'
'Cushie-cushie-coo,' said Lizzie to the restless baby.
(285-286)

Fevvers' excessive spectacular performance of the silliest,
"most feminine" texts of the popular feminine romance
tradition signals a contemporary woman writer's tender irony on her
own located position belonging to an ideologically constituted tradition
of always already femininized subjectivity and literature, as well as
her simultaneous deconstructive feminist gesture of performing
femininity's debilitating discursive (self-)representations with a
difference, from a revisionary, metareflexive, bifocal perspective,
aiming to subvert from within that which has been marginalized from
within. The aerialiste, discovering an enabling parallel between
feminine kitsch and subversive grotesque body-text, is able to produce
her own excessive, antagonistic, mockingly sublime and vulgar, kitsch
and grotesque, feminist (meta-)feminine, popular, pleasurable
carnivalesque text. The kitsch-work provided with a self-conscious
metaperspective is close to the carnivalesque by simultaneously,
bifocally considering the limit and its transgression, while on the
other hand, as Moles highlights, its delirious expenditure also
approaches the surrealist text-flow. Thus the (excessive romance of the
mock) silly lady novelist is replaced by a (just as much self-ironic)
visionary hysteric, the mad woman, the model writer of surrealists
(venerated in Breton's and Aragon's manifesto), the other
stereotypical trope of the woman writer in the patriarchal canon, whose
"much madness" carries the "divinest sense" a la
Dickinson, via a carnivalesque imbroglio's subversive creativity.

A carnivalesque histrionic hysteric text

Hysteria, an ideologically engendered, biologically determined
"female malady," refers to psychic conflicts finding their
symbolic expression manifested in corporeal symptoms, resulting in a
text written from the semioticized body. But in patriarchal readings the
somatized text produced fails to be interpreted as an independent
narrative of self-expression. The hysteric body-text--along with the
considerable corpus of "feminine" writings affiliated with
it--is primarily associated with bodily reality, being governed by the
wandering womb, repressed excessive sexual desires, demonic drives, it
is reduced to the level of indecipherable, invaluable delirious ravings,
irrational frenzies, sub-representational, phobic and phantasmic
association streams. Identified with pathological corporeality,
women's symptomatic writing conventionally can only be solved by a
male psychoanalyst-reader, who, in the process of healing
meaning-fixation, unveils, objectifies, reads, writes and erases her and
her mad writing on/from her body alike. The patriarchal cure of the
madwoman (as propagated by Hippocrates as well as Freud) wants to
eliminate the symptom distinctly marking her body by re-engendering and
re-interpellating her into the socially prescribed feminine subject
position, through the resurrection of her "natural"
willingness to marry, to submit to masculine desires, to return the kiss
of Herr K., to discipline and shut her body and thus end her madness,
her body writing, and successfully become a "real" woman; that
is, feminine, normal(ized), submissive, silent, unmarked and
non-writing.

Nights at the Circus is set in 1899, an era when Charcot's
possessed patients are displayed in the Salpetriere hospital (1889),
when Anna O's malady and her "talking cure" are made
public by Breuer (1895), when the disclosure of Dora's case brings
fame to Freud (1901). It is the golden age of silenced madwomen giving
birth to a legitimate male scientific discourse inspired by their
hysteric body-text that becomes the hidden other text, with a metaphor
"the madwoman in the attic" of psychoanalysis. In fact, the
mock-historical novel claims that Fevvers, a model of Lautrec and all
surrealists, a fiancee of Alfred Jarry, and a friend of Willy and
Colette, "in Vienna ... deformed the dreams of that entire
generation who would immediately commit themselves wholeheartedly to
psychoanalysis" (11); and, consequently, a true (simulating)
daughter of her times, Fevvers apparently embodies several hysterical
symptoms so as to stage adequately her patriarchal era's
pathologized woman becoming a public spectacle. In Madame Schreck's
museum of woman monsters--uncannily recalling Charcot's
"museum of living pathology" (40) at Salpetriere--as in other
stages of her career, she acts out the hysteric, "readily
appear[ing] to be an arch simulator, deceiver, and seductress,"
(41) performing simulacra of pathologic femininity. In the hysterical
scenario, her theatrical(ized) emotional crisis are paroxysmal symptoms,
her winged hunchback walk is abnormal movement due to psychosomatic partial paralysis, her aerialiste balancing and somersaults are abnormal
motor movements and convulsions, her wings are phantasmic bodily
protuberances or hysterogenic zones, her recurring spreading of her
(pseudo)wings is a hysterical conversion, a neurotic defense mechanism
against repressed anxiety. Fevvers' performance of femininity
enacts a par excellence example of hysterical personality: she is
egocentric, histrionic, emotionally unstable, a pathologically
excessive, "hyper-feminine" yet "unreal" woman,
embodying sublime transcendental femininity tainted with grotesque
corporeality. On the other hand, Fevvers is also the New Woman of the
new century, who refuses to be silenced by reviving a stereotypical
trope of woman writer--much more dangerous than the submissive angel and
her silly text--that of the madwoman speaking her subversive
(m)other-tongues. Fevvers' storyteller persona indeed recalls the
hysteric patient talking herself out in a disorganized speech to the
analyst-audience making notes of her mental creations, yet Walser is a
mere scribe directed by her voice, there is no need for his healing,
corrective psychoanalysis, Fevvers' narrative bears independent
pleasures of its own. Fevvers completely rejects the hysterical symptoms
of aphonia, aphasia and amnesia, it is the "note of rising hysteria
in [her] voice" (281), the vibration of her utterances, the
movement of her rhythmic, antagonistic (highbrow and Cockney, sublime
and grotesque, kitsch and hysteric, corporeal and aerial), excessive,
passionate, periodic overflowing sentences, "infecting" the
Carterian text, that mimes hysteric convulsions and performs a pantomime
creating a histrionic hysteric style--a corporeally convulsive yet
highly verbal, even "oververbalized," ironic text of the
"wondering womb." Fevvers, the arch-simulator, stages herself
in a spasmodic text as a riddle in constant spectacular
self-deconstructive metamorphosis, a hysteric sham, dragging the subject
in process from the dressing room to sea, sky, earth and even the
wonderland behind the mirror, a nomadic subject's journey, almost
too fast to follow:

Fevvers yawned with prodigious energy, opening up a crimson maw the
size of that of a basking shark, taking in enough air to lift a
Montgolfier, and then she stretched herself suddenly and hugely,
extending every muscle as a cat does, until it seemed she intended
to fill up all the mirror, all the room with her bulk (52, my
emphasis).
Fevvers pushed back her chair, rose up on tiptoe and lifted towards
the ceiling a face which suddenly bore an expression of the most
heavenly beatitude, face of an angel in a Sunday school
picture-book, a remarkable transformation. She crossed her arms on
her massive bust and the bulge in the back of her satin
dressing-gown began to heave and bubble. Cracks appeared in the old
satin. Everything appeared to be about to burst out and take off.
But the loose curls quivering on top of her high-piled chignon
already brushed a stray drifting cobweb from the smoke discoloured
ceiling ... (42)

Fevvers appears as the histrionic hysteric, constantly winking at
the audience in a joyously destabilizing fit of a convulsive text:
"Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he
thinks I am?" (290). Her paroxysmal discourse throbbing, pulsing,
beating on the page, reflects how her irrational performance, her
consciously convulsive, aerial grotesque movements mock reason and
tradition and shock the skeptic, down-to-earth spectator:

She gathered herself together, rose up on tiptoe and gave a mighty
shrug, in order to raise her shoulders. Then she brought down her
elbows, so that the tips of her pin feathers of each wing met in
the air above her headdress, At the first crescendo, she jumped.
Yes, jumped. Jumped up to catch the dangling trapeze, jumped up
some thirty feet in a single, heavy bound, transfixed the while
upon the arching white sword of the limelight. The invisible wire
that must have hauled her up remained invisible. She caught hold of
the trapeze with one hand. Her wings throbbed, pulsed, then
whirred, buzzed and at last began to beat steadily on the air they
disturbed so much that the pages of Walser's notebook ruffled over
and he temporarily lost his place, had to scramble to find it
again, almost displaced his composure but managed to grab tight
hold of his scepticism just as it was about to blow over the ledge
of the press box.
(16)

Through a feminist revision of the female malady (propagated by
Gilbert and Gubar, Cixous and Clement, Elizabeth Bronfen, Elaine
Showalter and Dianne Hunter among others),42 hysteria becomes a textual
engine carrying subversive discursive potentials addressed against
patriarchal thought and its phallogocentric representation. Fevvers
identifies with the revolutionary hysteric who rejects the homogenous cultural identity, the silent or superficial symbolization offered to
her, who tries to translate herself into another idiom by transforming
her cultural discontent into somatic manifestation, projecting her
dis-ease and (des)ire upon her body and converting this symptomatic
bodily transcription into a somatized verbal language of her own,
testing the limits of body, identity and symbolic representation alike.
Fevvers' histrionic performance acts out the hysteric, described by
Dianne Hunter as a "multilingual being," cleverly manipulating
discourse, finding her own voice, and creating her stimulating,
sympathetic listener audience. (43) As Gilbert and Gubar claim, the
display of the madwoman's monstrous autonomy signals the female
impulse to refuse to be killed into silence, to escape social and
literary confinement through strategic re-definitions of self. The
language of the hysteric, of Fevvers, reveals simultaneously the
vulnerability of symbolic representation and identity, speaking the
infected other tongues of the silly lady novelist and the raving
madwoman, identifying with the repressed other and acting out femininity
to the extremes signifies miming symptoms of other dis-eases and staging
the performative quality of syndromes of female maladies, in order to
"negotiate the interface between mimesis, imagination,
representation and deception" (44) and to reveal the
hysteric's subversive ability to "invent, exaggerate, and
repeat all the various absurdities of which a disordered imagination is
capable," (45) that is to simulate, fascinate, distress, fool,
seduce and overall to subvert. Thus what Elizabeth Bronfen calls
hysteria's grand fallacy recalls Butler's parodic performance
of (pathologized) gender in a subversive spectacle producing a
repetition with a differance, and a political meta-text in a voice of
its own--in the pervasive way Fevvers does in her spectacular histrionic
hysteric narrative-performance. Ironically, Fevvers' excessive
performance of femininity coincides with what Stephen Heath calls the
hysteric's failed masquerade, missing her identity as a Woman, that
is, not playing the game of being or not having the phallus, not playing
the game of accepting the phallus as a supreme signifier of an
impossible identity. (46)

In Fevvers' interpretation, hysteria is a commedia
dell'arte performance, (47) a carnivalesque subversion authored by
the spectacularly grotesque hysterical body. Allon White claims that the
hysteric discourse signifies an impossible, isolated, insane attempt at
the private, phobic (re)articulation of a repressed, marginalized,
fragmented carnival practice and its lost communal, regenerative
pleasures. (48) However, the excessive narrative of the both winged and
armed aerialiste has it both ways: instead of the broken fragments of a
carnival debris or debilitating hysteria, the text embraces total
carnivalesque celebration and unlimited hysteric festival within the
cathartic sphere of the circus. The text performs the clownism phase of
hysterical attacks, imitating animals and circus scenes in a compulsion
to repeat, accompanied by the craziest capers, somersaults and grimaces.
(49)

The birdwoman's narrative flight is that of Cixous and
Clement's newly born woman who can "fly and flee into a new
heaven and new earth of her own invention" (50) in her
heterogeneous text combining hysteric convulsions, witches'
flights, mad tarantella and vertiginous rope dance, with acrobatic
somersaults, grotesque contortions, clownesque grimaces and overall
spasmodic fits of laughter--all out-maneuvering the symbolic order, in a
histrionic hysteric festival of metamorphosis providing pleasures of a
Fevverish text.

"A series of inside stories of the exotic, of the marvellous,
of laughter and tears and thrills and all"

The feverish narrative performance staged in Nights at the Circus
cunningly surpasses the traditionally restricted carnival and mild
revolution associated with the conventional misreading of ecriture
feminine, which enables merely a "subversion from within" a
patriarchal representational system that stays immobile on the whole and
contains all attempts at subversion. In Carter's novel
Fevvers' mock-sentimental and histrionic hysteric, carnivalesque
grotesque language gradually embraces, engulfs and overflows the
intentionally patriarchal narrative authored by the skeptic, rational,
pragmatic journalist, Walser. As Paul Mags claims, Carterian women put
men through every circus hoop they themselves have jumped, from beneath
their false eyelashes flashing alarmingly and seductively all of the
vertiginous possibilities of the postmodern text, (51) and over all the
lure of women's writing. Although the intra-textual author in the
novel is Walser who, after his interview with Fevvers (Book 1), decides
to write as an incognito correspondent a "series of inside stories
of the exotic, of the marvellous, of laughter and tears and thrills and
all" (90) "invit[ing all readers] to spend a few nights at the
circus" with him (91), he does not have a direct voice of his own.
Instead, Fevvers' first person singular, autobiographical narrative
voice and an omniscient, mocking, metatextual narrative voice take turns
at weaving the text and eliciting its implied author, a grotesque winged
aerialiste. Thus, as I will reveal in the following, woman's voice
takes over to let female malady's Dickinsonian "infection in
the sentence breed" in Nights at the Circus, a confidence trick
challenging the engendering of canonization, a piece of women's
writing posing ironically as if authored by a man invited to waltz with
and as women.

The verbally talented Walser (9), fond of "cataclysmic shocks
because he loved to hear his bones rattle" (10), readily subjects
himself to Fevvers' performance, unaware that her narrative would
change his story. As if a premonition, her first spreading her wings
disturbs the air "so much that the pages of Walser's notebook
[ruffle] over and he temporarily los[es] his place" (16). Walser
acts like a member of the spellbound audience identifying with the
actress, his reactions mime those of the winged star, he is becoming
increasingly irrational, hysterical (feels composure almost displaced,
16), sketchily emotional and sentimental (feels "more and more like
a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to
unravel," 40). He simulates all symptoms of the aerial grotesque
being, writing on his body the hysterical text of iterated difference:
his clown-grimaces at little Ivan repeat Fevvers' terrifying,
fascinating effect on him, his wounded shoulder prophesies Fevvers'
broken wing, and most importantly, his typing, "flying
fingers" (97) embody her subversive corporeal performance and
narrative flight. Walser's personality-change coincides with the
transformation of his language influenced by the two
confidence-trickster Scheherezades directing his pen and destabilizing
his subject, dismembering him via their remembering: "The hand that
followed their dictations across the page obediently as a little dog no
longer felt as if it belonged to him. It flapped at the hinge of the
wrist" (78). The infection in the sentence spreads fast: when
Fevvers interrupting Walser's report writes in his notebook with a
"fine, firm, flowing Italic hand" (my emphasis), on reading it
Walser immediately exclaims "Good God" in fittingly
alliterating, emotional, excessive words (78). On his joining the
circus, Walser, the pragmatic, rational journalist is replaced by
Walser, the grotesque clown who performs in a masquerade not only a
newly acquired, self-deconstructive, heterogeneous identity but also a
virtuoso linguistic play, a meta-reflexive, mocking, hyperbolic,
catachrestic, polyphonic, unlimited, carnivalesque flow of silly kitsch
and insane hysteric artifice of ecriture feminine, a verbal drag, a
laughing text matching the spectacular feverish narrative of the beloved
winged woman:

Yes! Built as St Petersburg was at the whim of a tyrant who wanted
his memory of Venice to take form again in stone on a marshy shore
at the end of the world under the most inhospitable of skies, this
city, put together, brick by brick by poets, charlatans,
adventurers and crazed priests, by slaves, by exiles, this city
bears that Prince's name, which is the same name as the saint who
holds the keys of heaven ... St Peters burg, a city built of
hubris, imagination, and desire ... its boulevards of peach and
vanilla stucco dissolve in mists of autumn ... in the sugar syrup
of nostalgia, acquiring the elaboration of artifice, I am inventing
an imaginary City as I go along. Towards such a city the
baboushka's pig now trots (96-97).
Walser reread his copy. The city precipitated him towards
hyperbole, never before had he bandied about so many adjectives.
Walser-the-clown, it seemed, could juggle with the dictionary with
a zest that would have abashed Walser-the-foreign-correspondent. He
chuckled ... (98)

While Fevvers' native town is London, the home of the
confidence trick, and with St Paul's Cathedral resembling a
half-breasted Amazon, grotesque like Fevvers, the place of Walser's
rebirth is St Petersburg, the home of the famous Russian circus, "a
city stuck with lice and pearls, impenetrably concealed behind a strange
alphabet, a beautiful, rancid, illegible city" (98), apt to inspire
a linguistic turn, eliciting Walser's other writing and opening the
gates to the heavenly bliss of a pleasurable text with a touch of irony.
Walser's textual metamorphosis is directed by Fevvers. The once
self-confident, rational journalist falls for the winged giantess, who
dictates to him, stuffs a handful of cold cream in his mouth to silence
him (143), seduces him with her narrative and makes him realize in a
state of mental tumult that he has been duped, turned into a real clown
and that with a broken heart and arm "he cannot write or type"
(145). The journalist's disillusioned recognition of his being
deprived of his pen and profession in the middle of the novel (Book 2,
chapter 6) is followed by the most poetic, carnivalesque passages on the
circus, a subversive text authored perhaps by Walser, the feverish
clown, infected by the grotesque aerialiste's narrative:

Brisk, bright, wintry morning, under a sky that mimics a bell of
blue glass so well it looks as if it would ring out glad tidings at
the lightest blow of a fingernail. A thick rime of frost
everywhere, giving things a festive, tinsel trim. The rare Northern
sunlight makes up in brilliance for what it lacks in warmth, like
certain nervous temperaments. ... Amid laughter, horseplay and
snatches of song, rosy-cheeked, whistling stable-boys stamp their
feet, blow their fingers, dash hither and thither with bales of hay
and oats on their shoulders, sacks of vegetables for the elephants,
hands of bananas for the apes, or heave stomach-churning
pitchforkfuls of dung on to a stack of soiled straw. ... A
lugubrious gypsy strays into the courtyard to add the wailing of
his fiddle to the clatter of boot-heels on cobbles, the babel of
tongues, the perpetual, soft jangle as the elephants within the
building agitate their chains, the sound that reminds the Colonel,
always with a shock of pleasure, of the outrageous daring of his
entire enterprise.
(146)

The pragmatic reporter gives birth to the clown poet to depart from
homogeneous, disciplined subject position and compensatory
phallogocentric representation, and experience the vertiginous sense of
limitless freedom of the grotesque being (41, 103), "the freedom
that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle
with being, and, indeed, with the language which is vital to our being,
that lies at the heart of burlesque" (103). Throughout his
illuminating journey with the circus, a Siberian train-crash turns
Walser from ecstatic clown into a permanently delirious Shaman's
disciple, a concussed, amnesiac, aphasiac apprentice sorcier, who speaks
hysterically in tongues, considers the fragments of his English an
astral discourse, babbles beating his drum and duly deepens his
familiarity with the language of the other so that when Fevvers finds
him, he is ready for the interview. After his apprenticeship in the
highest forms of confidence trick, having waltzed with the giantess
winged aerialiste, screamed with the clowns and raved with the Shaman,
Walser, at the end of the novel, can make conclude that all his life, as
the text, happened to him in the third person, with his watching but not
living it, and can utter "I" for the first time in the text:
"and now, hatched out of the shell of unknowing by a combination of
a blow on the head and a sharp spasm of erotic ecstasy, I shall have to
start all over again" (294). The rebirth of the patriarchal word
starts with sharing the novel's final subversive female voice, that
is, the "spiralling tornado of Fevvers' laughter" (295).

As Beth A. Boehm also highlights, Walser is the reconstructed
reader who abandons his androcentric worldview and masculinized bias or
normalized technologies of reading and interpretive conventions, and
with his final-opening questions, "What is your name? Have you a
soul? Can you love?" (291), reenacts the beginning of the
narrative. This time, Walser, whom Fevvers "takes under her
wings" in Paul Mags terms, appears as an appreciative, cooperative,
Barthesian writerly reader, prepared to make love and jouissance with
the text. The reliability of the narrative voice, the credibility of the
story are mockingly questioned, the reader's expectations and the
transparency of representation are playfully destabilized as Walser, the
reader of Fevvers' indecipherable body, is invited to dance, to
waltz with the text. Walser, as the waltzing reader, is curious and
suspicious, surmising the ambiguous, multi-layered polysemy of
Fevvers' performance, her narrative of self as either/both hoax
or/and miracle, and is ready to take the alternative textual entry of
the active co-producer of changing, plural meanings in a narrative that
is seduction, spectacle and a comic play in one. The cruel, voyeuristic
collector Grand Duke--the old-fashioned, archetypal masculine reader
seeking to consume a single, final, phallic meaning of a stable work
that can be mastered--can interpret Fevvers' slogan "Only a
bird in a gilded cage" only literally and thus threatens to entrap
Fevvers in the form of a miniaturized artificial bird in the cage of
stereotypical femininity, doomed to silence, silly small-talk or
insanity. On the other hand, the homo ludens reader waltzing with the
narrative realizes the winking, ironic, metatextual, merry side of the
winged woman's narrative as well, and is ready to fly with her
text. Thus the conventional concepts of a domineering patriarchal
language violently incorporating and domineering weaker ecriture
feminine are demythologized, as the journalist becoming clown-poet
readily enters the carnivalesque grotesque narrative, laughing together
with the confidence trickster winged aerialiste author.

The portrait of the artist as a grotesque winged aerialiste

The grotesque Fevvers' carnivalesque life narrative
(constituting the first part of the novel) is told to Walser, the young
reporter, interpellated as a waltzing reader to be seduced by the winged
giantess and her midget stepmother, intruding in each other's
voice, commenting on, and complementing each other in a polyphony like a
grotesque twin-set of "two Scheherezades, both impacting a thousand
stories into the single night" (40), weaving the dialogic,
dissonant text, thus embodying the polyphonic, subversive woman writer.
The waltzing reader certainly notes that Fevvers' slogan "Is
she fact or is she fiction?" is also a self-reflexive question of
the implied author and that the description of Fevvers' ambivalent
voice is a metatextual comment on Carter's playfully subversive
text, a spectacular, seducing, enchanting, excessive and ecstatic
narrative of the aerialiste writer:

... her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about
the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it
strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with, it comprised
discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its
warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark,
rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren's. Yet such a
voice could almost have had its source not within her throat but in
some ingenious mechanism or other behind the canvas screen, voice
of a fake medium at a seance (43).

The cheerful narrative is a confidence trick, as the cavernous and
celestial, musical and disharmonious, homely and unheimlich, siren- and
fishwife-like voice of the winged aerialiste turns out to be the very
voice of the laughing woman writer, newly-being-born (hatched?) in her
subversive text.

The aerialiste persona of the artist balances among the lines of
numerous critics: according to Sarah Gamble, Fevvers' final
laughter is a metafictional comment in the form of an aerial double
somersault, in James Brockway's view, the winged woman walks the
tightrope on discourse, while Paulina Palmer looks forward to see where
the future flight of fiction would take her, and Mary Russo argues that
the portrait of the artist as a young mannequin ends with Winged Victory
keen on learning how to fly in a high flying rhetoric (my emphasis).
(52) For me, the grotesque aerialiste, the winged freak supported by a
midget stepmother personifies the woman writer located in a marginalized
female literary tradition of sister-texts, lacking anxieties of
influence or of authorship, writing from within yet subversively against
the phallo-centric language of patriarchal literary institution and
canon, providing in the "voice of a fake medium" a parody of
essentialist and exclusive phallic language and ecriture feminine alike,
from her unstable, heterogeneous, yet solid, located position.

Ironically, a double of the aerialiste implied author is
personified by the baboushka, a deeply embedded female narrator, whose
voice opens the second part, entitled Petersburg, as well as
Walser's report on his nights at the circus. The baboushka's
humble bow, her genuflection, her hands "slowly part[ing] and
com[ing] together again just as slowly, in a hypnotically reiterated
gesture that was as if she were about to join her hands in prayer"
and starting to part before touching (95) repeat the movements of a
ropedancer (though slowed down excessively in a grotesque way). Her
never finished tale, her "constantly repeated interruption of
[action and sentence] sequences" are interpreted by the unhatched
Walser as the drama of the dignified hopelessness of a wretched old
woman. Nevertheless, the baboushka's repeatedly restarted,
unfinished tale, told to grandson Little Ivan on the little pig,
succeeds in marking both Walser's narrative ("I am inventing
an imaginary city as I go along. Towards such a city, the
baboushka's pig now trots," 97) and influencing the flow of
the novel (introducing the porcine assistant Sybil into the text:
"If one pig trotted off to St Petersburg to pray, another less
pious worker travelled to Petersburg for fun and profit between silk
sheets in a first class wagon lit," 98). The "infinite
incompletion" (Carter's emphasis) of the baboushka's
work, suggesting that "woman's work is never done" (95),
recalls the aerialiste's gravity-defying rope-dancing mid-air in
the sense that it highlights the infinite possibilities of women's
writing resisting final meanings for a pleasurable, challenging,
creative balancing in-between inter-texts.

The aerialiste-text, as Fevvers' voice, balances on the thin
dividing line between sublime and ridiculous, revealing poetic cliches,
archaic diction, lofty tone, histrionic style, sentimental topos and
sublime narrative--conventionally regarded as features of feminine
literature--as mere mannerisms, semantically incongruous with the brute
materiality of corporeal reality, of a-woman's presence. Since, as
Lindsey Tucker also notes, Fevvers and Carter's text, "both
grand and vulgar," revels not only in the sloppy second-hands of
intertextuality and in the smells of carnival, but also in "many
representations of physicality" (53)--paradoxically abject
corporeality's unspeakable presence is repeatedly re-presented in
shallow cliches of the sublime that nevertheless turn, via their
excessive accumulation, deeply poetic, only to transform self-ironically
into a ridiculous commonplace again in a textual trick-flow constantly
duping the reader.

The enchanted audience balances on in-between borderlines, floats
with the magical(-realistic) waves of the narrative, flies with the
breezes and breaths of the text, as the winged aerialiste defies
gravity, a primary trauma preceding symbolization, and thus can
re-experience the preverbal, paradisiac, free-floating intrauterine bodily space of the Kristevan, threatening yet tempting, sublime and
abject, maternal chora, (54) an omnipresent otherness subverting
symbolization, and becoming the engine of the revolutionary poetic
language of the aerialiste authoring the vertiginous text. According to
Paul Bouissac, semiotician of the circus quoted by Russo, the air is a
space of negotiation for the aerialiste, less of an angel in the house
than a working girl in the air, which highlights her normally concealed
corporeality amidst simulated spectacle and in the air, defying gravity,
negotiates space from which alternative representative spaces for
heterogeneous, somersaulting identities may be articulated. (55) Helene
Cixous, elaborating on Mauss and Levi-Strauss, identifies the women in
the circus--"carnies, drifters, jugglers and acrobats"--with
the subversively speaking sorceress, hysteric, neurotic, ecstatic, and
outsider, afflicted with a dangerous yet productive symbolic mobility,
affecting the very structure whose lacunae it reflects, simulating
imaginary transitions, embodying unrealizable compromises, incompatible
syntheses, subversive configurations of a return to the other wor(l)ds
of childhood. (56) Accordingly, the grotesque winged aerialiste embodies
Cixous's newly born woman writer, creating her subversive text(ure)
by fusing translinguistic, giggling child play, unheimlich witchcraft of
Lizzie's household magic, hysterically excessive writing from/on
the body, risky borderline rope-dance and revisionary flight of a
birdwoman into her ironically playful Nights at the Circus.

Strangely, the sublime aerialiste image of the woman writer
coincides with Carter's grotesque, self-ironic authorial persona,
as this yarn spinning, tall-tale-telling wolf in grandma's clothing
uncannily recalls--in a typically Carterian excessive catachresis--the
fantastic freak Fevvers, the writing winged woman, "her white teeth
are big and carnivorous as those of Red Riding Hood's grandmother.
[as] She kisses her free hand to all. [and] She folds up her quivering
wings with a number of shivers, moues and grimaces as if she were
putting away a naughty book" (18) (my emphasis). Nights at the
Circus's narrative is constituted (and constantly
self-deconstructed) as a spectacular performance, a tricky play, a
subversive seduction, a "naughty book" flying with the
quivering wings of the giantess aerialiste Fevvers, embodying the
grotesque, winged, wayward woman-writer w(e)aving her whim,
transgressive body-text.

(31.) Sarolta Marinovich-Resch, "Interrogating the Iconography
of the Female Gothic: The Parody of the Female Gothic," in The
Iconography of the Fantastic, ed. Attila Kiss et al. (Szeged: JATEPress,
2002), 257-269.

(36.) Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Infection in the
Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship," in The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), p. 69.

(48.) Allon White, "Hysteria and the end of carnival:
Festivity and bourgeois neurosis," in The Violence of
Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy
Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Routledge, 1989), 157-170.